This study argues that five treatises on the legal status of Friday prayer in Twelver Shiite law that were composed between 1555 and 1563, in the middle of the reign of Safavid Shah Tahmasb, were all penned as part of a heated competition over the post of shaykh al-islām of the Safavid capital Qazvin. Detailed analysis of the first four treatises and the context in which they were produced, building on a 1996 article that discussed the fifth, demonstrates the influence of politics and academic rivalry on texts of Islamic law and other sciences, the types of rhetorical strategies used by scholars in the competition for patronage, and the importance of support of scholars for the establishment of legitimate rule and an official religion.

Almost ninety years have passed since the establishment of the Lebanese state, but it still lacks a consensual and unifying historical narrative. The Druzes of Lebanon, who claim to be the real founders of the historical Lebanese entity, reject the Lebanese historiography elaborated by Christian historians as ideologically motivated, sectarian and fabricated. Furthermore, they claim that their contribution to Lebanon's history has been systematically minimized. The Druze leader, Kamāl Junblāṭ, was the first to raise public awareness of the importance of rewriting Lebanon's history, and the process of doing so has gained momentum among Druze intellectuals since the 1980s. This article discusses the efforts of the Druze intelligentsia to cultivate a historical narrative that presents an alternative to what they call the “Maronite narrative”; it focuses predominantly on the Emirate's history during the Middle Ages and the reciprocal relations between the Druze political experience within modern Lebanon and the intellectual formulation of their narrative.

In this essay, I look into the growth in the Ottoman ilmiye hierarchy, and its emergence as a distinct career path, through an analysis of the backgrounds and careers of forty-nine officials who reached the highest four ilmiye positions. The analysis reveals that towards the middle of the sixteenth century new teaching and kadılık offices absorbed the growing number of ilmiye officials. After 1570, limitation of tenure periods and rules for promotion and removal were introduced to facilitate the employment of more officials. Meanwhile, greater emphasis was placed on receiving one's education and obtaining teaching positions in the central cities, especially Istanbul. Those scholars educated and taught in areas distant from the centre lost the opportunity to reach the highest ilmiye posts. In addition, after 1550, the sons of government officials were increasingly favoured in the ilmiye hierarchy.

This article deals with the grammaticalization of the lexical meaning of GUO “to cross, pass” in Mandarin Chinese. GUO displays two aspectual/temporal values, known as the experiential suffix -guo and the phase complement guo respectively. The first indicates that in the past there is at least one instance of the event represented by the sentence and the second that an expected event has occurred and is now over. The experiential suffix refers to indefinite occurrences, whereas the phase complement refers to definite occurrences. These two values can be unified at a theoretical level. Aspectual GUO is concerned in all cases with the location of events in time: it situates an event in the (relative) past and it indicates either that among past events there is at least one occurrence of this type of event (suffix -guo), or that a particular (previously identified) event has passed, that is, entered the class of the past events (phase complement guo).

When Thomas Stamford Raffles published his seminal text The History of Java in 1817, ruins were a favourite leitmotif in British art, forming an important element within the visual vocabulary of the picturesque. Given the fascination in this period for the ruin, fuelled by a tradition of antiquarian enquiry, the newly developing science of archaeology, and the increased possibilities for travel in the wake of imperial expansion, it is not surprising that Raffles chose to devote a whole a chapter of his publication to Java's ruined candis. The plates and vignettes which illustrate the chapter, created according to pictorial conventions that were ordinarily applied to the crumbling remains of Europe's classical past, are amongst the most beautiful portrayals of South-East Asia's architectural remains. This paper examines how these images elicited set emotional responses associated with the idea of ruins and ruination and confirmed key stereotypes associated with the region, linking the candis, and by implication the Javanese themselves, with a vanished past rather than with a dynamic and forward-looking present.